- Why You Should Worry About Keeping Your Computer Safe
- Getting to Everything Security Related in Vista
- What Spyware and Malware Are and How Your Computer Gets Them
- Symptoms of Malware on Your Computer
- Getting Rid of and Keeping Malware Off Your Computer
- Windows Defender
- What to Do If You Suspect Malware But Can't Get a Pop-Up to Close
- What Is a Virus and How Is It Different from Spyware?
- Protecting Your Computer from Viruses
- Determining If You Have a Virus
- The Importance of Automatic Updates
- Turning On Automatic Updating
- What Is Windows Firewall?
- Why You Should Back Up Your Computer
- Backing Up the Files on Your Computer
- Backing Up Your Entire Computer
- Where to Store Backups
- Restoring Your Computer from a Backup
- Automatically Backing Up Your Computer
- What Is Service Pack 1 (a.k.a. SP1)?
- How Do I Get SP1?
- How Do I Install SP1?
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Where to Store Backups
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Where you store your backups is almost as important as backing up itself. If you leave with any one piece of advice from this tip, I hope it’s this: do not store your backup on the same hard drive that Windows runs on. Why? Because if your computer hard drive ever crashes, then your backup is gone along with everything else. There are really only two good options for backups: one is a DVD and the other is an external hard drive. Me personally, I use both because each has pros and cons. DVDs are great. They’re easy to store offsite and pretty cheap to purchase. But you may misplace them, or scratch them, or do something that could cause them to become unreadable. An external hard drive is like your computer hard drive, but it’s not in your computer—it’s a separate device that you connect (usually through a USB cable). These work great, too. However, they are, after all, electronic and governed by all of the rules and regulations that electronics typically face (read as: they can sometimes stop working for no reason at all). So my preference is to use both. I create a backup to an external hard drive. Then I copy that to a DVD, so now I have two backups and that should keep me fairly safe in case my hard drive ever does crash.